A coordination meeting on the training of law enforcement officers of the Central Asian states and Afghanistan in the field of countering the illicit drug trafficking was held on December 18 -19, 2008 in Vienna.

UNODC reported to donors and member states on the project implementation outputs in 2008, including the findings of the recently conducted independent interim project evaluation. In 2008, all twenty six Russia-NATO Council member states acted as project donors. In the course of the meeting, representatives from the beneficiary states reported on the project's positive impact on employees performance indicators, and noted that all large seizures of narcotic drugs carried out in the region had been initiated or conducted by officers trained in the framework of the project. One of Tajikistan's DCA employees was awarded a high government decoration which can be considered one of the qualitative indicators of the specialists' retraining.

Experience obtained during fixed site and mobile training courses was discussed at the meeting. The parties discussed the challenges they had faced implementing the project as well as the positive experiences. A work plan for 2009 was developed with the involvement of donors and member states. In particular, eight training courses for law enforcement personnel from the Central Asian countries and Afghanistan are supposed to be conducted this year on the basis of International Interagency Training Centre of the All-Russia Institute of Advanced Training MI Russia (contribution to the project budget amounted $800,000). Turkey expressed its readiness to conduct sixteen training courses in 2009-2010 with a total budget $600,000; Hungary expressed its willingness to conduct two training courses in Afghanistan with the budget $20,000; other countries, including US, expressed their readiness to participate in the seminars as well.

The meeting participants agreed upon the general criteria of the project performance evaluation which was positively assessed by the donors.